Fear and Action

Ray Katz
6 min readFeb 9, 2024

The psychology of ordinary people becoming a movement and rescuing the climate.

Photo by Kid Circus on Unsplash

As a kid, I thought I couldn’t do much of anything. I was the youngest of four, and as I watched my older siblings go out into the world and do grownup things like getting jobs and dates, I kind of hid in my room. I tried to avoid the world and just exercise my imagination.

I enjoyed that. My ambition was to get a boring job, stay there for 50 years and when I got home, to do creative things — write, draw, invent. Today, in the final quarter of my life, deep in my heart, that’s still what I want.

But something happened along the way. The simple life I sought became unreachable. Despite my diligence and loyalty as a worker, I never landed that steady boring job. Indeed, the world in which those steady boring jobs existed disappeared.

I had no choice but to try something. I was worried. I felt overwhelmed. I didn’t know what I needed to do to make a living, build relationships, to be a part of the world. I was, and remain, an introvert and somewhat of a loner.

Somewhere along the way, I made a few decisions:

  1. Try to live a lifetime free of regret, and
  2. Blast through my limits, and reach for what seems impossible

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Ray Katz

Internet pioneer. But I’m most interested in stabilizing the Earth’s climate and promoting our common humanity. WeAreSaners.org